She stood in the gap, one hand on the door, and I could see it now — up close, without the buffer of Bev and Theo and office noise. The shadows under her eyes. The stillness in her face. The way she was holding herself like one wrong word would unravel something she'd spent all morning keeping wound tight.
"How's Maisie after the riding lesson?" I asked. "She recovering from the horse withdrawal?"
The corner of her mouth twitched, but the smile didn't reach her eyes. "She's drawn fourteen pictures of Rosie this week. Fourteen. I'm running out of fridge magnets."
"That's dedication."
"That's obsession." But her voice was thinner than it should've been.
I didn't push into the office. Didn't invite myself in. I stayed where I was and waited, because I was learning that Callie Monroe didn't open doors when you knocked — she opened them when she was ready, and the only thing you could do was stand there and not leave.
"Walk with me?" I said. "I'm parked down the block. You look like you could use some air that isn't this office."
She hesitated. Looked back at the paperwork on her desk. Then at me. Then at the empty office behind her — the stillness of it, the alone of it, the weight of a room that was supposed to have people in it.
"Sure," she said. "I could use the air."
Callie walked beside me with her hands buried in her jacket pockets, chin down, and the distance between the office version of her and this version — out here, in the light, without an audience — was the distance between a woman performing okay and a woman barely holding it together.
I leaned against the truck. She stopped a few feet away, squinting at the sky like she was deciding something.
"Maisie's with her father this weekend," she said. Just like that. No preamble. "Every second weekend. It's the custody arrangement."
I didn't say anything. Just waited.
"I dropped her off last night." Her jaw tightened. "She didn't want to go. She told me she didn't want to go, and I packed her bag and drove her there and handed her over because that's what the agreement says, and he took her like —" She stopped. Swallowed. "She was so quiet, Clay. The whole drive. She just sat in the back holding her horse and not talking."
Her voice was steady, but her hands weren't. She'd shoved them deeper into her pockets.
"And now I'm sitting in that office pretending to work because the cottage is too quiet and if I stay there I'll lose my mind." She looked at me. Her eyes were dry, but the helplessness behind them — the naked, furious helplessness of a mother who'd just handed her child to a man she didn't trust — hit me like a fist. "Sorry. You came in for a friendly chat, and I'm —"
"Don't apologize."
"I'm fine."
"I know you are. But you don't have to be. Not with me."
She stared at me. The sidewalk was empty. The sun was warm on the truck and Callie Monroe was standing three feet from me with her hands in her pockets and her guard down forthe first time since I'd met her, and I wanted to pull her into my arms so badly it ached.
I didn't. I stayed where I was and gave her the only thing she'd let me give her — presence and space to be not fine.
"Have you tried Dottie's pecan pie yet?" I asked. She blinked. The shift caught her off guard — I watched the tension in her face stutter, recalibrate.
"Twice. I'm developing a problem." He’d gotten Maisie hooked on it and when she got some, I always found myself having a bite and then getting a slice for myself.
I grinned. ”Wait until you try the cherry. It'll ruin you for all other pie."
"I can't afford to be ruined by pie, Clay. I have an ass to maintain.”
My smile deepened into a smirk. ”For what it's worth, the ass is doing fine."
She huffed a laugh — a real one, surprised out of her before she could stop it. And I watched something in her face ease, just a fraction. Like she'd been holding herself so tight she'd forgotten she could let go, and a dumb joke about pie and her ass had been the thing to remind her.
Perfectly deadpan. And there she was — underneath the exhaustion, underneath the hurt, Callie. The dry, sharp, funny woman who could cut you at the knees and make you thank her for it. She didn't ask me to leave. She moved to stand beside me at the truck — not close, but closer than she'd ever voluntarily stood — and we watched the nothing happening on Main Street for a few minutes while something in her slowly, slowly unclenched.
"If you tell Clara Mae I was out here looking fragile, I'll have you killed," she said.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
